


with you

by dutchydoescoke



Series: bad things happen bingo [1]
Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-06 22:22:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15204719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dutchydoescoke/pseuds/dutchydoescoke
Summary: “Would you leave me?” he asks, soft and quiet because the question doesn’t need to be any louder. And volume won’t make Kel anymore inclined to listen. “If I had to go up there for some gods-forsaken reason, would you leave me to go it alone?”Kel doesn't climb Balor's Needle alone.





	with you

**Author's Note:**

> what, me, write self-indulgent kel&neal fic for bad things happen bingo? there's a shocker.
> 
> this was started as a fill for "panic attack" and has since morphed to a fill for "blood-stained clothes", though it's... kind of meandering and the prompt is filled more on technicality than anything. still. (this came into existence because my brain went "okay but what if neal went with her.")
> 
> ignore the shitty title. i couldn't come up with anything.

The problem, Neal thinks, is that Kel expects him to _listen_ to her about this. That after all the pointed reminders about chivalry and looking out for each other, he’ll just leave her here to rescue Lalasa herself.

“If we’re made to do it all over again, you aren’t allowed to say a single word of complaint,” Kel says, after a solid minute where he refuses to leave no matter what she tries, like the threat of that punishment could possibly change his mind.

She’s not wrong about it. He’s hated being so much older than his year-mates, hated taking classes for things he could have done in his sleep. But as much as he’s hated it, he won’t let Kel do this alone.

He thinks he could handle doing it all again, every class, every fighting practice, every riding lesson, if he does it with her. And being forced to attend first-year lessons at fourteen and fifteen with no one who quite understands is something he’s already experienced; he wouldn’t wish it on her.

“You have my solemn vow, Mindelan,” Neal replies, smiling as much as the situation allows for. “Not a word of complaint about being full-grown and yet surrounded by children and once more sitting lessons I already could do in my sleep shall pass my lips should the Stump enforce the rules about tardiness.”

Kel doesn’t even deign to respond to that with anything more than a roll of her eyes. He lets her gather whatever she wishes to take, sees her tuck away knives in easy-to-reach places. When she starts walking, he follows, letting her lead the way. They check the other quarters, the tailors, the armories—even the catacombs. It’s not until they rest at the fountain for a minute that the sparrows find them, screeching and whistling.

“Have you found her?” Kel asks and when two of them drop Lalasa’s hair and Jump’s fur into her hand, Neal resolves to never make a comment about her menagerie again. “Show me where.”

It’s not a surprise when the birds lead them to Balor’s Needle.

She tries to get him to go to the exams once more, to let her handle this. Like he’d leave her to face the Needle on her own, with her problems with heights.

When she gives him the stone-faced look that brooks no argument, Neal stares straight back and raises his eyebrows.

“Would you leave me?” he asks, soft and quiet because the question doesn’t need to be any louder. And volume won’t make Kel anymore inclined to listen. “If I had to go up there for some gods-forsaken reason, would you leave me to go it alone?” 

Kel’s mouth tightens into a thin line and she downright _glares_ at him. It works both ways, their friendship. She wouldn’t leave him if the situations were reversed and he refuses to let her do this without him.

He’s never been up to the Needle’s balcony, never having gotten far enough in his training to require the kind of range the Needle allows for, and as content as he would be to never set foot on it, fate seems to have intervened to ensure he must. His comfort in this is the fact that it’s to help someone in need. Not just Lalasa but Kel, though he knows she’d rather climb the outer stair than admit a weakness.

The door to the Needle is heavy and creaks as it opens to reveal the inner stair, hitting the metal wall with a thud. There’s a lamp burning on a small table, unlit torches resting next to it. He picks one up and lights it, providing just enough light to see the first few steps. Kel takes a deep breath and starts climbing, shaking like a leaf in a storm, and Neal steps parallel to her. Their steps echo through the tower in a way that makes him uneasy. There’s none of the palace noise here, none of the whispered gossip of servants or the faint noises of the nobility in residence.

Her shaking gets worse the further up they go and he reaches over without thinking, taking her hand in a way that falls far outside their established boundaries. Kel tenses for a second, locking in place, then relaxes slowly, one muscle at a time. Her shaking lessens to almost non-existence, though her grip on his hand tightens the higher they get.

Neal doesn’t let go until they get to the top.

It takes both of them to shove the door open against the wind, even pulling from his Gift for extra strength. It hits the wall, like the one below did, revealing Lalasa bound, gagged, blindfolded and left near the edge, with Jump tied to the railing next to her. One step onto the platform and Kel starts shaking again, like she can feel the distance to the ground.

“I’ll get them,” he says, because he can and while he knows she can and would, she doesn’t have to. Not with him here.

He takes a few steps towards Lalasa and freezes when he hears Kel yell and the door slam. He jerks around to see her trying to open the door again, to no avail. Trapped.

This is what he gets for thinking about the outer stair. Kel’s worst nightmare.

Kel tries the door for another moment before giving up with a groan. Before he can say anything, she straightens and her face smooths out into her mask, expressionless and calm to most people. Neal knows her well enough to read the terror in her, but he lets her have her pride.

Kel frees Lalasa while he cuts Jump’s rope, careful of the dog’s injured back leg. Lalasa’s wrists and ankles are raw from the ropes and Neal offers to heal her before they make their way down, though he doubts Lalasa would accept. Kel whispers to her for a moment, inaudible over the wind whipping at them from every direction, and when she’s done, Lalasa nods. He makes sure to keep his hands from touching her when he heals her, green fire washing over her wounds and closing them, relaxing muscles knotted and seized from being bound in one position for so long.

While he heals her, she tells Kel what happened, how well thought-out the plan was, how prepared they were. Neal lets himself smirk at the news that Jump took a bite or three out of them. He has no sympathy for those who hurt innocents like Lalasa.

He gives an extra push with his Gift, warming her as much as he can before he finishes and stands. Kel helps Lalasa to her feet and picks up the burlap bag to fashion a sling for carrying Jump. Even if Neal could heal animals, none of them would want Jump walking down those stairs on his own. He doesn’t argue when Kel takes the sling, Jump tucked into it in a way to minimize jarring his leg.

“I’ll go first.” They both say it, Neal a split second after her. He doesn’t bother to argue this, either. He’s won enough important arguments today, so he waves a hand towards the stair with his best Player’s bow and says, “after you.”

“I’m lighter than you are. If I step and it doesn’t give way, it should hold for you,” Kel replies as she passes him and looks at the stairs, a green tinge to her face. He knows she’s not looking straight down but she doesn’t need to for the height to mess with her. Neal reaches out and touches her shoulder in reassurance, a reminder for her that he’s here for support if she needs. He knows that by her logic, _he_ should be the one going first, but that’s another argument he won’t win.

She edges towards the stair and carefully rests her foot on the top one, eyes on the wall as she tests her weight. When it holds, Kel closes her eyes and her mouth moves for a second in what is probably a curse for the architect of the Needle. The stair is the same on the outside as inside, just winding in the opposite direction, wrought-iron vines and flowers curling up around the building almost as if they’d been grown and turned to metal. Kel turns and sways a little, hands clamping onto the railing and hesitating before going down another step. He can tell she’s shaking even from this distance and he doesn’t blame her.

_He’s_ uneasy at about the stair and he’s not once had her problems with heights.

As Kel makes her way down the first few steps, Neal gestures Lalasa forward, making sure she can walk well enough to make it down the stairs before he follows her. He wants to be next to Kel to help her stay calm, but he doesn’t want to leave Lalasa to trail behind without someone to help catch her and pull her back upright if she stumbles. Between the wind whipping them between the railing and the wall and a stronger gust that _rattled_ the stair, none of them say very much. Kel seems distracted but _okay_ , the few times he catches sight of her face, and doesn’t notice where she’s stepping until her foot goes through a rusted-out flower on one stair, the iron carving a line up her leg and shredding her hose.

Kel’s cut-off groan is what gets his attention, the blood dripping down her leg to the roof tiles of the castle, some sixty feet below them, making him realize what happened. Lalasa stumbles into Kel at the unexpected stop and Neal offers her his hand to help her stabilize herself again and pull Lalasa’s weight off of Kel’s already-injured leg.

“Mindelan, you’re going to be the death of me,” he says, edging closer and keeping an eye out for any other rusted spots. When the green fire of his Gift starts to form, Kel shakes her head.

“I get tired after healings. You know this. If you heal me now, I won’t have enough energy to get down the rest of the stairs.” Neal grimaces at the thought of leaving her leg as it is. It’s not as deep as it could be, but she doesn’t need to just leave it for however long it takes them to get onto solid ground again. “Take Jump for me so I can get my leg out.”

He takes the dog and leans back to give her room, trying to ignore the sound of the iron tearing her hose further. There’s a ripping noise and Neal looks up to see Lalasa tearing strips off her petticoat to hand over. Kel reaches for them but he smacks her hand away, trading Jump for the strips so he has his hands free.

“You, sit there and wait. I might not have finished university but I’ve seen my father bind enough wounds to know how to do it.” He wraps them around her leg, putting enough pressure to hopefully prevent further bleeding. Lalasa hands him her apron when he asks and he uses that to pad Kel’s leg further, tying the strings off tighter than necessary to be safe. “Thank you, Lalasa.”

When he looks at Kel’s face, her eyes are on her hands, avoiding the sight of the ground far below them. He reaches out and takes one of her hands to quell their shaking. Kel looks up at him, her expression as blank as it usually is barring the slight wrinkle between her eyebrows that says she’s hurting more than she lets on. He stands, careful of the rusted step, and helps pull her upright when it looks like she might be too terrified or in too much pain to get up on her own.

“Come on, I’d like to get down there before I’m old enough for my theoretical children to be taking the big exams,” Neal says, cajoling her into moving, and smiles when she rolls her eyes at him again. He takes Jump back and puts the sling over his own shoulders, letting Kel lead the way down. He stays behind her this time and leaves Lalasa behind him so he can catch her the next time she almost injures herself.

When the whistling wind gets to be too much, he gives into the urge to talk. It might help her relax a little. “One day, we’re going to meet the architect of this tower, if he isn’t already in the Black God’s Realm, and I’m going to hang him upside down from these stairs.”

That startles a laugh out of Kel, even as she pauses on the next stair. “I’ve been picturing worse. The next few stairs are rusted, so we’re going to have to use the railing to make it,” she says, raising her voice to be heard over the wind. He tenses up when she first puts her weight on the railing, gripping tight enough that he’s sure she’ll have vines on her hands for weeks, and doesn’t relax until she’s on the next solid stair. There’s only twenty feet below them and the castle now, but it’s a nerve-wracking drop nonetheless. He steps back to let Lalasa go next before he steps onto the railing and inches his way towards safety.

There are a handful of other stairs that are rusted out, but none in succession after that and when they set foot on the flagstones, Neal’s ready to start thanking the gods he can name for them being safe.

Lalasa’s friend—Tian—comes running over as Kel asks the sparrows to retrieve Daine, holding out the note instructing them to look on Balor’s Needle as an explanation for why she’s there. Daine arrives in less time than it should, by all means, take, out of breath from sprinting and nearly skidding to a stop while Neal takes the sling off. He’s too worried about Kel to even think about being flustered by the Wildmage’s appearance, for all that he likes her, and hands Jump over with a few words about what’s wrong before he takes Kel’s arm and nudges her to a sitting position.

“We’re on solid ground and Lalasa can tell them what’s going on,” he says before she can open her mouth to argue. He peels the makeshift bandages off and hisses at how much more her wounds have bled. Green fire flares out from his hands, brighter and faster than it did when he healed Lalasa, and he pours as much of his Gift as he can into healing her, chasing out infection and dirt and sealing up the wounds just as the palace guard appears with a healer—his _father_ —and starts checking over Lalasa.

There's sweat on his forehead and exhaustion creeping into his bones and Kel is glaring at him again for healing her, though it doesn’t last long. She leans against him, both of them sitting on the ground, too tired to get up. His father checks Lalasa over with a glowing hand and pronounces her just fine, if tired and in need of rest, before checking Kel.

“You did well, despite a lack of training,” his father says and Neal smiles, leaning his head against Kel’s and closing his eyes. “And despite overextending yourself.”

“ _Neal._ ” Even through the exhaustion in her tone, her annoyance is clear.

“I’m not apologizing,” Neal murmurs, for her ears only. “You can yell at me more later but you lost a lot of blood and Mithros only knows what else could have gotten into those scratches.”

There’s an answering mumble from Kel that sounds suitably irritated and he smiles. He jerks his head up not much later when Jump starts barking, launching himself out of Daine’s lap and at the pair being held by the palace guards. There’s a bite mark on the cheek of one of the kidnappers and bandages around their arms. Neal’s smile widens at the damage Jump did, reaching out to pet him when he wanders back over as the kidnappers are hauled away after Lalasa identifies them.

Kel’s asleep on his shoulder, not even stirring when the bell tolls out to mark the beginning of lunch or when Jump hops into her lap, so Neal doesn’t move, just throws his arm around her shoulders and combs his fingers through her hair and lets her sleep on.

Soon after the noon bell tolls does a woman that can only be Kel’s mother appear, heading straight for them. She smiles at the sight of them, Kel’s head still on his shoulder, and asks if Kel can be taken back to her rooms. Neal doesn’t want to let her out of his sight quite yet, so he nudges her awake enough for them to stand and to help her back to her room.

They must look a sight, Neal realizes; Kel’s arm is over his shoulder and his around her waist to help keep her upright, her hose are shredded and bloody, Kel’s tired enough between the healing and the heights that he’s worried she’ll fall asleep on the walk there, and Jump and the sparrows are following them, along with Lalasa, Tian and Ilane herself in all her court finery. He doesn’t even want to think about how he looks.

“If you’ll allow us some time to change her, you can sit in while she rests,” Ilane offers and Neal nods in appreciation, nudging Kel towards her mother once they get to her rooms. The door closes behind them, leaving him with only Jump for company while he waits. He’s worried, perhaps unreasonably so, and he’s not yet comfortable leaving her be. She was told to do something out of her nightmares and she did it with almost no complaint. He doesn’t qualify the statements about the architect to be complaints, since he’d been thinking the same thing.

He leans against the wall until the door opens again and Ilane ushers him in, whispering, “she’s asleep and there’s a chair by her bed.”

Neal drops into the chair gratefully and reclines as much as the seat allows, looking at her. It more than qualifies as creepy, watching her sleep like this, but he hopes she’ll forgive him this time.

“Gods, Mindelan, I’m going to be gray by the time I’m twenty at this rate,” he mutters, almost missing Ilane’s amused smile.

He wonders if the Stump is really going to enforce that punishment, given the circumstances. He winces at the thought of having to do everything over again, going through staff fighting and hand-to-hand lessons with first-years almost a decade younger than him.

Still, if redoing the last four years of his training is his penance for making sure Kel hadn’t done this alone, he’d do it a dozen times over, until he’s his father’s age and still writing essays for the Mithran priests on the Immortals War.

Neal wonders, sometimes, if she knows how far he would follow her if she needed him to.

Her bloodied hose is on the floor by the dressing room and his own shirtsleeves are stained with her blood, he realizes and makes a note to change before dinner. He’s not surprised when he feels himself start to drift, propping his head up with his hand and starting to doze.

**Author's Note:**

> end result: this friendship went from zero to sixty in, like, one morning. or, well, from "sarcastically calling kel 'mother' and asking her to make sure his uniform doesn't look terrible" to "i would climb down a real life crash bandicoot level with you" in one morning.
> 
> i'm.... most likely going to write more about this. mostly in how it affects their friendship bc boundaries get a little loose and emotions get a little weird when you've held your best friend's hand to keep them from having a panic attack over heights to go rescue their maid and think you're going to be stuck together for another four years.


End file.
